"Please teach your subeditors the basic facts about your own country. It does NOT include the Republic of Ireland," a reader lamented last week when our coverage of the World Snooker Championship left us, well, snookered.

A reader complained: "Mr Everton seems to have forgotten that Ken Doherty, from the Republic of Ireland, won this title in 1997."

Actually Everton was correct, as the British Isles is a geographical term generally taken to embrace the large islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and the many smaller ones in the vicinity, such as Orkney, Shetland and the Isle of Man. So Doherty was not "from outside the British Isles".

However, the Guardian style guide advises against using the term because of its unpopularity in the Irish Republic – with good reason, you may think (as I do), given the nature of the historical relationship between Britain and Ireland. As our sports desk will have been aware, for example, the former "British Isles" rugby union team (often referred to as the "British Lions") has, since 2001, been known as the British and Irish Lions.

Getting back to the snooker, we made an ambiguous situation much worse when the front page of guardian.co.uk proclaimed that Robertson, an Australian, had become the "first foreigner to win the world title since 1980". (It also described him, at one stage, as "the first non-British winner" since 1980.) Doherty, winner in 1997, is of course foreign and non-British.

A reader responded: "Your reporting of Neil Robertson's victory … gets to the heart of why many Irish people are irked by the term British Isles. Trailing an article that uses the term accurately ("the first world champion from outside the British Isles in 30 years") with an innacurate statement on the front page of the website ("first foreigner to win world title since 1980") shows how it can be easy to lazily conflate the geographical with the political while making poor Ken Doherty a subject of the British crown.

"It is easy to see how this can happen given the ambiguity inherent – maybe this is why you should retire the term altogether." I agree.

Another reader, more emphatically, said: "Ken Doherty is from the Republic of Ireland. He is NOT British. He is just as foreign as Neil Robertson. The Republic of Ireland is NOT British. Unlike Australia, the Republic of Ireland is not in the Commonwealth and has its own NON-BRITISH head of state. As an Australian, Neil Robertson is therefore more 'British' than Ken Doherty. This is far from the first time the Guardian has referred to Ireland as being British. Please stop it as we Irish find this insulting."

The Guardian has long enjoyed a good relationship with its wide readership in the Irish Republic. We are the only British newspaper, I believe, to spell Irish Gaelic words and phrases, such as Fianna Fáil, with their correct accents. The Irish Free State was established in 1922 and the Republic of Ireland in 1949. We normally remember that.